Google demos early Android 2.0 (Donut) features at I/O event

At the Google I/O event in San Francisco yesterday, Google demonstrated some of the upcoming features of Android 2.0, also known as Donut.

First up was a very Palm Pre/webOS like combined search function that searches the phone and the internet at the same time, as a user types in a search string. For example, if you typed in “Oryl” you might find the contact record you had for me in the phone, as well as find a few references to my work on MobileBurn as reported by Google’s search engine.

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Another feature shown was on-screen handwriting gestures to navigate long lists. Engadget has posted some photos of it in action, and you can see that an ‘e’ was written on screen in order to skip ahead in a long list.

Google also showed a translation service and announced that there will be an API available for text-to-speach on Android phones. Photos after the jump.